Embodiments of the invention relate to user selection for task performance and, in particular, optimizing user selection for task performance in social media.
Social media are popular avenues for information sharing or exchange. Information sharing systems, such as forums for obtaining product reviews or social question-answering systems are sometimes helpful to users on social media platforms. People also informally exchange information in the form of questions and answers in social media, such as Facebook® and Twitter®.
One use of information exchanged in social media platforms is to perform tasks, such as translating a sentence from one language to another language, problem solving while developing software, administrative processing, shopping using a particular website, obtaining a deal for a travel website, responding to questions, etc. Finding the right people on social media to obtain the desired information (often for task completion) is difficult for several reasons. Maybe none of the friends in one's own social networks are able to perform a task, e.g., they may not know the answers to a specific question, they may not have gone through a certain process so they do not know the details, or they do not know the language in question. Additionally, there are a multitude of strangers on social media, and not many of the strangers may be able to perform the task, e.g., answering a question.